Ebsen and Co. danced with stars on 2 coasts

Florida FLASHBACK

March 25, 2007|By Joy Wallace Dickinson, Sentinel Staff Writer

From the buzz I've heard, Central Florida's Joey Fatone of 'N Sync fame made the best celebrity showing in last week's premiere of the latest Dancing with the Stars. And in one of those odd synchronistic connections, just a couple days later I read of the death of Vilma Ebsen in California at 96.

What's the connection between Vilma and Joey?

They both practiced their dance moves in Orange County, separated by decades, of course.

The Orlando area's connection to dance goes back a long way, thanks to the Ebsen family.

Vilma Ebsen died March 12 in Thousand Oaks, Calif., an Associated Press obituary said, noting she had owned "the old Ebsen School of Dancing in Pacific Palisades."

I never knew my old dancing school had a Pacific Coast twin! The building is still there in Orlando, on Hyer Street, not far from Lake Lawsona in what's now called Thornton Park.

One or two afternoons a week after school when I was about 9 or 10, like many other Orlando girls, I reported there to take lessons in ballet and, for a time, tap. But the real subject matter, perhaps, was what it takes to strut your stuff on the stage of life.

I had shot up in height early, and while most of my classmates seemed petite, fluffy children who resembled Shirley Temple in her prime, I felt a bit like the giant in Gulliver's Travels -- a large sore thumb in the middle of the dance-recital line.

But the show went on, and I learned lots from my good Ebsen dance teachers.

From Europe with love

The school then was owned by another Ebsen sister, Norma Albert. But it had begun with the maestro, the man who started dance instruction in Orlando: the father of children including Vilma and Norma and their famous brother, the late Buddy Ebsen.

Christian Ludolf Ebsen had come to America from a small village on the border of Germany and Denmark; his wife, Frances, was from Latvia.

They met ice skating on Lake Michigan and settled in Belleville, Ill., a town with a large German-American population where Christian Ebsen coached basketball, offered dancing lessons and taught what was called "physical culture" -- a kind of physical education.

In 1920, when their children were young -- Buddy was 12 -- Mother Ebsen's health inspired a family move to Florida.

After a year in Palm Beach, the Ebsens thought it wise to seek out a new hometown where people would want dance lessons all year long, not just in the winter season.

Christian Ebsen "looked around and found Orlando," Buddy Ebsen recalled years later. "He fell in love with it because it was a family town, a year-round town. And it was beautiful."

They first rented a home near Lake Eola and eventually settled at 9 S. Hyer Ave., where Christian Ebsen built their house and later a dance studio -- the same place where I took classes years later.

`What a marvelous dancer'

Eventually other family members and associates got involved in teaching, but the first was the children's dad.

"Oh, what a marvelous dancer Mr. Christian Ebsen was. Dance with him, and you couldn't even feel your feet on the floor," a former student told the Orlando Sentinel in 1986.

According to local lore, it was Norma who lent brother Buddy $50 in 1930 to try his luck in New York, where the lanky hoofer and 1926 Orlando High grad made good.

Soon Vilma, who was teaching at the Hyer Street school, joined her brother in New York for the Broadway run of the musical Whoopee. They went on to Broadway Stars of the Future; the Broadway revue Flying Colors, in which they introduced the song "A Shine on Your Shoes," and the 1934 Ziegfeld Follies, in which they sang "I Like the Likes of You."

The following year they came to Hollywood for MGM's movie musical Broadway Melody of 1936, in which the Ebsens introduced "Sing Before Breakfast" on a brownstone rooftop with Eleanor Powell. They also showed their stuff in "On a Sunday Afternoon" and danced in the big "Broadway Rhythm" finale.

"Vilma and Buddy Ebsen danced together in just one movie, Broadway Melody of 1936," Miles Kreuger, president of the Institute of the American Musical in Los Angeles, told the Los Angeles Times last week after news of Vilma's death. (Buddy Ebsen died in 2003 at 95.)

"He was tall and charmingly gawky, she gentle and warm. The combination was irresistible both on stage and in that film," said Kreuger, a friend of Vilma Ebsen's. "Her warmth was genuine and touched everyone she knew."

Buddy Ebsen went on, of course, to a varied career that eventually brought him pop-culture immortality as Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies, but after her only film role, Vilma returned to New York, where her husband, Robert Emmett Dolan, was a Broadway conductor.

(The Dolans moved to Pacific Palisades in 1941 with their son, Robert, born in 1939. They later divorced, and in 1948, Vilma married tennis player Stanley Briggs, with whom she had a son, Michael. The Briggses later divorced.)